Facebook as a Free Marketing Tool - Essay Example

Journal on the Effectiveness of Facebook as a free Marketing tool

The journal ‘Effectiveness of Facebook as a free Marketing tool’ is authored by Arthelo Parma. Arthelo is one of the best authors with specific interest to social media marketing. In this book Arthelo examines the efficiency of Facebook as a marketing platform and tool. before examining the publication of the journal, it is prudent to have a snapshot of what the discusses. The author states that when Facebook started to filter out unpaid promotional, marketers were reluctant since that would only incur them extra expenses for advertising online. There have been significant studies on the efficiency of Facebook, however, there is limited empirical evidence on how the platform works as free marketing tool after the new policies and rules were formulated. The author identified this gap, and has sought to try to understand consumer behavior at the personal context towards posted threads that have content on needs and emotions. The journal highlights how Facebook can be maximized to attain better marketing goals. He determined that through graphical trend presentation, the income of the blog increased significantly.

The journal is a research work and thus broken down as a research work; introduction, methods, results and recommendation and conclusion. However, the arguments within the journal are drawn from a wide range of sources ranging from research work from other scholars, practice applications to research work done by the author. The practical application section of the journal used information from articles that are done by different individuals such as freelance writers. The information from the articles solely focused on Facebook marketing. The articles are of different topics and of different number of pages, however, all of the articles have information that can be implemented to improve the use Facebook as a marketing tool.

The content of journal is relevant to all stakeholders with interest in using Facebook to promote their products or organizations such as marketers, public relations practitioners, sales persons, entrepreneurs, social media scholars among other interested parties. The author realized the prevailing gap that needed to be addressed. He focused on marketing because most people use Facebook as a social media platform for interaction and only a handful number of people have utilized the platform for commercials. At the moment there are hundreds of millions of people on Facebook that can be reached and thus an excellent platform to reach the target audience. However, even those who understand that they can gain from the large number of Facebook user do not understand how to utilize it for their gains. The article is written to marketers to offer guidance on how they understand consumer behavior, emotions and needs. They can post their products on the platform and from the feedback obtained gauge the emotions and behavior and then implement strategies that suit their needs and behaviors. The findings of the researcher inform the relevant stakeholders that human feelings or emotions are dynamic and unpredictable or are constantly changing.

The main types of articles used by the author are organic reach and post engagement articles which are obtained through evidence based practices. The use of this kind of practice is important to the area of social media marketing as it involves practical determining consumer needs and changes in attitude and preferences. This inferred that any information obtained must be backed up with concrete evidence and solid research. It therefore, postulates that Facebook marketers must have and keep the latest research on consumer behavior so as to offer services or products that are congruent to the needs of the consumers. This is the reason as to why the research section is very important. It features peer reviewed research articles on different studies on Facebook marketing. Some of the journals are complex to integrate but they have tables, graphs and charts to help make the ease understanding and make the information readily available.

The publishers and the editors mainly seek to reach to the business persons as their preferred audience. They presume that the audience is well conversant with the basics of Facebook and only seeks for information on how they can better their business operations by taking advantage of the Facebook as a marketing platform, however, do not know how to best maximize the benefits of the platform. This is evident as information directly gets into how to maximize the use of the platform without any highlights on the basics of the platforms. Furthermore, the researcher uses complex arithmetical analysis such as the regression analysis. This cannot be easily understood by anyone who is not well conversant with such analysis. The author therefore no doubts seek to reach to the well informed business persons that can understand the complex analysis and successfully implement the recommendations to gain the anticipated outputs.

This article is different from other articles, despite the layout or rather the structure is similar to other articles. The difference is that this journal uses relatively complex analogies in explaining its arguments which are backed up with extensive sources thus proving the credibility of the information. Most of the other articles that I have analyzed before often do not have a strong backing of the information presented raising credibility of the information sometimes.

I chose this article because the subject matter of discussion is one of my areas of interest and I sought to find more in order to gain more insights. By analyzing this article I have gained much knowledge on how to maximize Facebook as a marketing platform. In particular the aspect of examining consumer needs and behavior has been quite informative. This article I believe is a perfect example of the intention of the journal as a whole as it highlights the most important sections opening the reader’s eyes to professional possibilities that they might have probably not been aware of and which can be integral to further their career. Having a keen interest to social media marketing, I have gained useful insights that will help me in my future researches.

The effectiveness of Facebook as a free marketing tool is part of series that continues throughout the several issues. This is because of the marketing field that keeps on changing. There is a lot of technological advancements that are taking place in the business world that forces organizations to be always in line with the latest technology. Marketing consumes great resources of any company. Organizations invest millions of shillings trying to market their products. Not only products and services advertised but also the brand of the organization. Since Facebook started, many organizations have taken advantage of the free platform to advertise their products. People are now not only using the platform for free and effective marketing but are also trying to be more innovative and get more Facebook subscribers. The fact that one needs to be innovative while using the Facebook platform to advertise their products and services is an indication that it is part of several issues that are continuing. People are now not only doing marketing through Facebook, but they are also trying to come up with some new ways that they can improve business operation with Facebook. Organization strategists argue that in the future, marketing through Facebook will be used to initiate many more other things that affect the operation of the company. The article has proved that the use of Facebook as a marketing tool is part of several activities. The author of the journal in his recommendation argues that the study has been given quite a good period and further revenue study that are in line with Facebook marketing will be very beneficial in the future as there are only a few studies showing how Facebook can be used for marketing. This is proof that Facebook marketing is not a one thing appearance but part of a series of activities being innovated to provide cheaper and effective methods of advertising.

The writer of the journal, Arthelo P. Palma does a regular publication concerning how marketing is progressing regarding the use of social media. Therefore, the publication of the effectiveness of Facebook as a free marketing tool is a consistency in what he used to publish. In the Abstract section, the writer states the origin of the use of social media in advertising. He says that marketers were reluctant in the year 2014 to use the platform for marketing as they were afraid that it would only mean more expenses to be paid for the marketing. The journal has conducted a study that has touched on various aspects of marketing in regards to the use of Facebook. Some of the aspects that the journal has looked into details are the customer behavior on Facebook at the personal context in regards to the posted threads on Facebook using articles that had content on needs and emotions (Hays, 2013(. To effectively analyze the results, the writer used negative binomial regression where the organic reach found to increase the traffic of the blog. Arthelo P. Palma has published other more articles in the field of the economy such as the truth behind the economic performance, natural resources and how they attract foreign direct investment.

This is in a way related to the article on the effectiveness of Facebook as a free advertising platform. It shows that the writer is out to educate his target audience on larger scopes of marketing and the business world at large.

The main focus of the article is to find out more about the effectiveness of using Facebook as a free marketing tool. The journal has incorporated all the variables that need to study to find out the best findings. The focus has been narrowed down to understand the behavior of the Facebook users who are the target and how they react to things that have been posted. The writer has carried out a test using posts that can generate traffic which in turn means better marketing sites. In the Introduction section, the writer has educated his audience what marketing in Facebook is, how Facebook pages can be created for free to be effective marketing platforms. The editors and publishers of this journal are focusing on an audience of marketers that are using Facebook as their marketing tool. The focus is also to reach startup companies that cannot invest in other expensive marketing tools (Hsu, 2012). This can be seen in the method section that aims at looking how traffic can be generated on a page and then be used as the best marketing too. Anybody reading the article would probably be confused by a lot of information that is in the journal and the regression analysis that has been done. This journal is available in the ASU library and people who can access it can get it to be very resourceful. This article is created to assist all the target audience to broaden their understanding of the use of Facebook for marketing. The research design used was the fundamental principle of descriptive-correlation research. This design gave the quantitative explanation of the variables and improvement of the construct validity of the study. The predictor variables of post engagement were the type of article thread and organic reach. Purpose sampling technique that was used was very effective as it assisted to give direct results that are very resourceful to the users.

The information that the writer was trying to get to is the effectiveness of Facebook in marketing. The journal has acknowledged the fact that more than a billion people use Facebook every month. This shows that it can be easy for an organization to reach its target audience via Facebook. The writer has looked into the best ways that one can use to generate traffic through showing what kind of posts can bring a large audience. This shows that the primary goal of the writer was to educate people that Facebook can be used in marketing. It is a very powerful tool according to the writer of the journal as it also offers a platform where the organization personnel can easily interact with the public that are in different geographical locations.

Reference

Hays, S., Page, S. J., & Buhalis, D. (2013). Social media as a destination marketing tool: its use by national tourism organisations. Current issues in Tourism, 16(3), 211-239.

Hsu, Y. L. (2012). Facebook as international eMarketing strategy of Taiwan hotels. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 31(3), 972-980.